Gigoptix has worked on polymer modulator for many years before it sold the technology to BrPhotonics, a joint venture between Gigoptix and Brazilian state research institute CPqD, prior to Gigopix itself merged with Magnum Semiconductor and became GigPeak which eventually was acquired by IDT this year. Before selling the polymer modulator technology, Gigoptix demonstrated high performance prototypes and pretty long time reliability data (in other words, more mature than what LightwaveLogic achieved now) and sampled to a bunch of customers but none of which moved forward with them. When I talked to BrPhotonics at OFC last month, it seems the situation remains.
I learned about WavelengthLogic when it emerged in the new earlier last year. I believe it's a similar technology maybe based on different polymer materials, after all these chromophore materials are always proprietary and key to developers in this area.
To me, this technology is in an awkward position for different segments of optical communications. Both companies initially targets long-haul telecom to replace LiNbO3 modulators but the bar is just so high for such small-volume (tens of thousands) and extremely performance and reliability focusing products that until now none of other technologies including mature InP and emerging Si photonics has ever won over LiNbO3. Metro telecom is interesting with fast growing volume especially counting booming cloud DC-interconnect. But it's also a hot battle ground for PLC, InP and Si photonics (which now steals all the spotlight with Acacia's last year's IPO and amazing growth). I don't think polymer modulator can either compete on performance (with InP) or cost (with Si photonics) in this segment.
Intra DC is the fastest growing segment where Si Photonics shines the most with seeing real volume on 100G transceivers from Luxtera, Intel, Mellanox, Inphi, Macom, etc last year. By nearly all means, Si photonics has inferior performance than its InP counterpart however, it can very cheap (as long as they don't count the hundreds of NRE they poured already) as long as Si foundries are getting seriously involves as Mitch Heins continuously reported in this forum. Even so, InP still holds the vast majority of this segment. So again, I don't think polymer has either the performance or the ecosystem to compete here.
btw, the slides showed a "current" cost of 2km 100G transceivers (for DC) at $1000. This is far far from truth and one can tell right away if reading a few news from last 6 months. I don't know why a veteran like Mike Lebby used such outdated numbers. I think with getting him on board they want to attract investment and acquire some other companies (on different technologies) to get into the market.
